The Geomancer

5/9/07

Gradisil Is Pure Genre Porn with Rich Emotional Resonance

Posted by
Lou Anders

Adrienne Martini reviews her first Pyr title for Bookslut, proclaiming that Adam Roberts' Gradisil has blown her socks off, which are "currently in orbit around Jupiter." This is a fun review, which gets right to the essense of the book and makes you smile while doing so, with sentiments that start like this:

"Like a late-night infomercial -- wait: There’s more. Roberts keeps adding layers of pure genre porn like quantum space planes over a structure with rich emotional resonance. He takes us on an old-fashioned catalog of space wonders and cultures whenever we’re in the Uplands. He envisions what will happen to language over the next two millennia, dropping silent letters from his prose as the century passes. If that weren’t enough, he sketches out a plausible outline for the geopolitical future that is completely believable and never bogs down in detail."

I encourage you to read the whole review, which does a good job of expressing why Gradisil works without any major spoilers, though as Adrienne says, "On its surface, Gradisil -- the title is derived from a Viking myth rather than the cervical cancer vaccine -- is a simple story about a driven man whose jones to escape the Earth causes nuclear-grade fallout that effects at least three generations of his offspring. That one line could describe any number of science fiction page-turners. Most writers, if given that brief, could weave lovely little stories that momentarily entertained but failed to leave any lasting impression. Roberts, however, isn’t most writers. His take on this brief is so exquisitely layered that it is hard to know where to begin teasing out what makes it all come together without giving away too many of the surprises."